January 2011

May is a month of traditions: of flowers and commencements, of the Kentucky Derby for 117 years and Indianapolis five-hundred-mile races for 81. For an automobile race, Indy is ancient. Back in 1911, it was an all-day affair, as the winner covered five hundred miles in six hours and forty-two minutes. These days winners complete the distance in less than three hours, the same oval unraveling for a driver with the same turns, banks, and exhilarating straights. Everything has been tried in American auto racing in nearly one hundred years, from unabashed blood sport to fine competition—to the delight of manufacturers, promoters, and drivers. And fans. With so much choice and change, fans are the great governing board in American racing, creating some traditions, like Indy, to last.

The year was 1932; the country, like most of the world, was in the depths of the Depression. I was seven years old. My brush with history began one day when I heard my dad call my name as he burst through the back door. I thought: What have I done now? But when I saw his face, I knew he was not angry, but very excited and even happy. My dad had not been happy in a long time.

We were living then in a big, rundown Victorian house near an old racetrack in Louisville, Kentucky. The track was no longer used for racing, but was maintained for training, and its barns were kept for horses from Churchill Downs. My dad had lost his factory job a year before and had finally found a job doing odd jobs at the track. He would clean stalls or walk the horses after their morning workouts.

“Come quick,” he yelled. “I want you to go with me up to the track.” This was surely something special; he never allowed me near the barn area with its rough men and rough talk.

It is hard for a journalist to admit that he didn’t know a story when he spent an evening with it. I had that experience, sad to say, because the story was no less than the imminent honeymoon of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

On a July evening in 1939, my wife and I gave one of our frequent Saturday get-togethers—big on talk and drink, given our finances, less lavish on food. The guests were mostly newsmen and their spouses, and the talk mostly about where Hitler would strike next, weekends being high on his calendar for that activity. “The Fuhrer takes a country in the weekend,” it was being said, “while the English take a weekend in the country.”

1792 1867 1942 1967

Columbia’s River

Sailing on behalf of a Boston trading company, Capt. Robert Gray came upon the headwaters of the Great River of the West on May 11 and then did what earlier explorers had not: he entered.

The First Grand Wizard

In May, while officially still in the insurance business, the ex-Confederate general and guerrilla leader Nathan Bedford Forrest took his place as the first Grand Wizard in the recently formed “KuKlux Klan.”

Home Front

By May the American war effort was thriving at home, if not yet overseas. Farmers in Brooks County, Georgia, worked their fields by electric light once the sun had gone down, while the city of Atlanta tore up six thousand tons of neglected trolley track for its steel. Across the country people were volunteering as air-raid wardens for their blocks; twenty-three thousand block captains were sworn in at one time in the Chicago Coliseum.

Altamont had been settled soon after the Revolutionary war…. And, for several decades before the Civil War, it had enjoyed the summer patronage of fashionable people from Charleston and the plantations of the hot South.” Thus did Thomas Wolfe describe his hometown, Asheville, North Carolina, in his first, largely autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel . Located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and blessed with cool breezes and an abundance of natural beauty at a high altitude, Asheville still attracts summer guests. Yet if Thomas Wolfe were to return to Asheville today, he would find it much changed from the bustling little town he had observed from the front porch of his mother’s boardinghouse, The Old Kentucky Home.

The traditional Boston rocker was once described by the pioneer American furniture historian Wallace Nutting as “the most popular chair ever made, which people sit in, antiquarians despise and novices seek.” What distinguishes the classic Boston rocker from other rocking chairs are its gracefully scrolled seat, high spindled back, spool turnings, and rolling crest and headpiece. The first Boston rockers, which were as likely to have come from Connecticut as from Boston, were made of oak with solid pine seats. Like the one shown here, the early, handcrafted versions were painted and grained black and often embellished with stenciled fruit and flower decorations.

As a college sophomore in 1960, I had little interest in politics, except that the woman I was dating was a member of the Young Democrats on campus. Democrats at Oregon State College in those days were a rare commodity, so, when the presidential campaign got under way, our little group didn’t expect to be much involved.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we were asked by the State Central Committee to help play host to Senator John F. Kennedy when he made a campaign speech in Corvallis. I knew nothing about campaigns or electioneering, so I was given grunt work: nailing up posters, running errands, and stuffing envelopes.